Our Cognitive Surplus

Let’s project our minds forward into the future about 10 years. The P2P problem has been solved, either by a levy on P2P or by some amazing new business model. In this brave new world money is somehow moved from the bank accounts of viewers into the pockets of content creators. The transfer will probably occur on the basis of times shared, downloaded or viewed. I.e. the money from the levy is pooled and divided among the artists on a per cent basis. The key difference being that products no long have a price to be paid by a customer. In this new world one-man-bands who produce their own music are hugely superior to the Juggernaut that is the Movie and Music Industry.

Will things change things drastically?

Yes. Let’s look at someone like Charlieissocoolike from youtube. He’s one bloke with a camera who spends some of his time doing stuff for youtube. He’s getting about 400,000 views per video. He’s making about 2 videos per week. Let’s do some math. Imagine Charlie does his thing for a 2 years, which is roughly the production cycle of a feature film. By my math he’s going to get about 80 milllion individual ‘downloads’. Let’s take a movie like Shrek 2, the 4th biggest movie according to IMDB. It took about $450million in the US. Let’s double that to account for the rest of the world and DVD sales, and pretend each ticket cost $6, which is roughly the average. That gives us 150 million individual ‘downloads’. You see the problem?

How do we divide up this pot?

I suppose there’s three ways of dividing the pool: 1) Maintain Movie Star’s Pay. 2) Give Charlie a Fair-Go. 3) Set the price at something a user will be happy to pay.

1) If we rig the system to keep Movie Stars as Movie Stars, Charlie is going to be on a salary of over $150,000,000 per annum. Good news for Charlie, but not at all realistic.

2) Alternatively, we could rig the system to give Charlie a fair go. He’s talented so we’ll say he deserves $200,000 p/a. That works out to about 0.0025c per view. I’d pay that to watch Charlie (inside my levy) and I don’t think Charlie would complain – it’s certainly more than the You Tube partner scheme is paying him.

But how much money does Shrek 2 make at that rate? About $400,000. Given that Shrek 2 probably took 400 people to make there is no way the bills will be covered.

3) We could charge users a fair rate and then just divide it. A fair rate might be some like $20 a month, but the same problem will come up.

Summary: On a per-artist basis Charlie is orders of magnitude better than Hollywood. If Hollywood is making money, Charlie is uber rich. And if Charlie is making money, Hollywood is bankrupt.

The New Landscape

Looking into my crystal ball I see a landscape where we return to ‘around the camp-fire’ entertainment. Except the camp-fire is our internet connection and the people around it are communities huge relative to traditional camp-fires but tiny relative to Hollywood. This is not what we’ve come to expect over the last 50 years. We’ll get people like Abby Simons from Songs From a Hat and Hank from VlogBrothers who perform to audiences in the tens of thousands, but rarely crack the million. The artists will be able to make a decent living, but they’ll never be the multi-millionaire celebrities the Music Industry currently makes.

And I think this is brilliant. The problem with big budget productions is that, to recoup their expenditure, they need massive target audiences. And to entertain massive target audiences you need to find lowest common denominator stuff. If you look at the Hollywood blockbusters they usually revolve around ‘aww, isn’t that cute’ ‘wow, look at that explosion!’ or jokes about poop. That’s not good entertainment. Alternatively, if you slash your production costs you can still be viable while talking to a much smaller audience. Take for instance Thunderf00t and his Beauty In The Universe channel. He discusses relatively niche issues, like busting Creation science or exploring the geography of North America. But he does it well, he gets views and there is no reason he shouldn’t get decent renumeration in a new media distribution system. And the value of entertainment the end user gets is far more refined to their interests. Rather than watching something designed to entertain almost anyone, we get to watch something designed specially to entertain people like us. This compounds with the ‘web 2.0′ benefits and people get to interact with other people like them around the same camp-fire. Great examples include Nerdfigthers which have grown as an interactive community around the Vlogbrothers and Sportsracers which grew around Ze Frank.

What’s the Merit of Modern Celebrity Anyway?

We’ve looked at what you gain from this move into the 21st Century, and to me it seems awesome. But what do we lose? What dies is the super-rich Pop/Movie Star. They can’t monetise sufficiently without become smaller players. All I can say is good riddance. The cult of celebrity is just strange and unhealthy. It seems to me that pooling so much attention and money in individual human-beings tends to break them. I think a good conclusion-laugh should be left to The Onion who think that ‘Unless Americans turn to alternative sources of entertainment, the ‘Hannah Montana’ star will soon be completely tapped out‘.